PAST CRIMESappointed judges which could pass sentence for the most serious crimes.
Such a crime was committed by Alan of Leverton, clerk of Sherwood
Forest, and his page in 1279. These two were accused of taking a doe in the
forest with a red greyhound, although the body of the animal was not found,
as it was lost in the dark. Alan was sent to gaol for the offence, and his
property seized. The page did not turn up for trial, and may have gone on the
run. Adam d’Everingham was the Warden of the forest at that time; the
position was inherited by his son Robert, who soon lost the job and ended up
in prison for poaching deer himself!
Possible evidence for deer poaching in the medieval period turned up
during excavations at a site in Kingston upon Thames, now under a big John
Lewis store. This area had been used as a cattle market and butchery site, and
contained a number of pits full of waste material from carcasses, including
many cattle foot bones. Hidden in one of these pits were the remains of a red
deer, presumably poached from the royal park of Richmond, and concealed
amongst the other, legitimate, bones in the market.
The rabbit, or coney, seems to have been reintroduced into Britain in the
twelfth century, although there is some evidence for rabbits during the stone
age and Roman periods, but they had died out until the Norman Conquest. At
that time, these delicate Mediterranean animals were reluctant to breed in the
cold damp northern climate, so special artificial warrens were built to shelter
them (Figure 20). Rabbits were rare in our countryside until the eighteenth
century. Some of the warrens were immense–one at Thetford had an outer
boundary stretching eight miles. Special weeds were encouraged within the
warren enclosures, and feed was imported for the winter months. As rabbits
commanded high prices for their meat and their fur, it is not surprising that
they were a target for poachers. Whole gangs appeared, some armed and with
dogs and nets, to take advantage of unwary warreners. There is a record of a
canon at Blythburgh who made a business of training and leasing out dogs to
other poachers, including his fellow canons. In 1442, three of the canons
appeared in court, caught in the act of poaching with their trained
greyhounds.^4
Rabbit warrens were sometimes enclosed by moats as well as fences. A
number of warrens have been excavated, especially the form known as a
pillowmound. These oblong earthworks often enclosed stonelined tunnels
and chambers for the rabbits to inhabit. There is a large concentration of such
pillow mounds on Dartmoor. In some places, homes were built for the
warreners too, such as the 1590s‘folly’at Rushton, Northants.